SOURCE: “‘Death in the Woods’: Anderson's Earliest Version,” in The Winesburg Eagle, Vol. 7, No. 2, April, 1982, pp. 1–3.

In the following essay, White discusses a 1916 version of “Death in the Woods.”

The Sherwood Anderson devotee is surely pleased that “Death in the Woods” has achieved status as the author's story outside of the Winesburg cycle most often anthologized and given scholarly attention. Without disparaging “I'm a Fool,” “I Want to Know Why,” and “The Egg,” one delights to see “Death in the Woods” become to the public the typical, the standard, the representative single Anderson story; for the texture, the ambiguity, and the complexity of a boy's discovering a woman's dead body in a frozen woodland repays with interest any amount of invested study.

Because Anderson made of “Death in the Woods” a reflection on developing awareness of the grotesquerie and beauty and truth in life, full discussion of the...